In Japan, where joining a large company after graduation -- and sticking with it -- is the traditional measure of success, Mr. Okubo's career decisions are somewhat unorthodox. He credits a traditional Western practice -- the internship -- with giving him the wherewithal to strike out on his own.

Mr. Okubo is one of more than 30 young Japanese people to have powered up their own businesses doing an internship organized by the Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities, a four-year-old, nonprofit organization. The group's goal is to use internships to bolster independent thinking and entrepreneurial spirit, qualities some feel are sorely lacking among Japanese university graduates.

The traditional Japanese recruitment process is intense, and usually begins with a series of interviews during the junior year. Companies tender job offers at the beginning of their senior year, so students spend their last year secure in the knowledge they have a company job. If students work, it's typically a part-time job at a restaurant or a music store. In fact, the first thing ETIC organizers do during intern orientation is to explain how an internship is different from flipping burgers at McDonald's.

"We can't do things the old way anymore," says ETIC director Atsuko Suzuki, who thinks nurturing alternative career paths is an essential step in lifting Japan out of its economic doldrums. "The country's economic situation is changing. Society is changing. We have to change, too."

ETIC's program takes an individualistic approach to ensure interns get hands-on experience to help them in choosing a career. Small start-ups, most of them high-tech companies, pay a 250,000 yen ($2,024) annual membership fee to ETIC. The organization then matches the companies with students from Osaka and Tokyo. ETIC also mediates between company and student, helping each party set goals and allocate job duties. Whether students get paid or not depends on the company; some pay as much as 1,000 yen an hour, others pay only in experience.

ETIC was founded by go-getting 29-year-old Haruo Miyagi as an offshoot to a series of entrepreneur seminars he organized when he was a student at Tokyo's Waseda University in 1993. It was spurred by his frustration with the Japanese system, where, he believes, students waste their talents in a blind rush to grab a few spots at top companies. Since 1997, the number of ETIC interns has jumped to 450 a year from 60.

Mr. Miyagi says that, historically, Japanese used to be more entrepreneurial, particularly before World War II, and that many of the country's biggest companies were started by individuals. "But these days . . . it's unusual for a young person to start his own business," he says, and it's often considered something only a dropout would do."

Mr. Miyagi hopes that being exposed to challenging work situations at an early age will reawaken their economic initiative. ETIC doesn't want interns serving coffee -- they want them to have positions of responsibility.

By contrast, internship programs at Matsushita and Fujitsu have a more company-oriented focus: to spot talent and improve the employee selection process. Interns at Fujitsu spend three weeks shadowing employees. Even Fujitsu's general manager of human resources, Toshimasa Wada, admits, "We really don't expect them to do much."

Not having anything to do was never a problem for Mr. Okubo, who attended an ETIC seminar on entrepreneurs and consequently became fascinated with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley wunderkinds. In his sophomore year he did an internship as a programmer at a Web-design firm, planning and maintaining an online software shop. Two years later he interned as a marketing associate, researching and analyzing fishing-industry businesses.

His internship work was a far cry from his robotics studies at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he gained technical experience but learned nothing about business. Through the internships, "I was able to get sales experience and marketing experience," he says. They also gave him the confidence to abandon the lock-step life of college graduates looking to enter Japan Inc. -- a path traveled by many, including his father, whose entire working life was spent with Mitsubishi Corp.

Mr. Okubo's company, Fact-Real.com, which he started with a friend, aims to capitalize on the new generation of mobile Internet use, designing Web sites that can be accessed by portable phones. Despite the uncertain economic times, Mr. Okubo says he wouldn't trade places with his father and the security of lifetime employment. "We are scared of failure; of lost money and lost time," he says. "But I felt that it's better to do a start-up because I'm young. Also, if I join a company I would have to work from the bottom and wouldn't have the same experience."